TEMPO Interactive, Tangerang:The Head of Tangerang Regency’s Board of Food Security, Didi Aswadi, said that 2.483 hectares of rice plants are threatened with crop failure. “Rice fields are not harvested because it is difficult to get water”, said Didi to Tempo on Wednesday, September 5, 2012. He counted that if one hectare of rice fields produce 5 tons of rice then the loss of harvests this year reaches the numbers of 12 thousand ton. According to him, based on the evaluation with the involved agencies and the Board of Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics (BMKG), this year’s drought hasn’t entered the extreme phase. “The dryness are still normal,” he said. Thousands of hectares of rice fields in Tangerang are dry because the irrigation channel who has been the mainstay of the agriculture stopped. The cause according to him is due to the shrinking of Cisadane River’s water discharge. “The rice fields have been extremely dry with the split soil caused by the drought,” said him. According to Didi, the rice fields in Tangerang Regency reach 40 thousand hectares. Around 30 thousand hectares of it are rainfed rice fields and the rest 10 thousand hectares are non-rainfed rice fields. Cultivation are done two times a year. Drought is now engulfing the rice fields on the south area of Tangerang such as Sepatan, Mauk, and Pakuhaji. JONIANSYAH